Thursday

Feb 1, 2018 at 3:23 PM

There have been dozens of films about the AIDS epidemic, but few as powerful and transcendent as Robin Campillo’s Cannes prize-winner “BPM (Beats per Minute).” It thrives on its writer-director’s choice to approach the issue from a political slant, drawing on his own experiences as a member of the Paris chapter of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It’s a 1990s-set drama that plays like a compelling documentary, with Campillo seating you in the middle of a series of town-meeting type gatherings of HIV-positive activists as they plot and plan acts of civil disobedience against the dismissive federal government and drug companies they feel are dragging their heels in making promising new protease inhibitors available to the sick and dying.

The tactics are inventive as well as cathartic; like a raid on a big pharma lab, where the protesters douse the place in buckets of fake blood to draw attention to the immediacy of their plight. But there’s a deeper message that rings as loudly today as it did then, and that’s seeing the power of resistance carried out in the name of a noble cause. That it arrives in the midst of the #MeToo and anti-Trump-anti-racism demonstrations rising up in the streets of America only adds to the film’s invigorating energy. But it’s the people, most of them young, gay and in a desperate fight for self-preservation, that clutch you by the ventricles.

We meet a half-dozen or so of these fierce, cunning “community organizers,” some of whom are based on people Campillo knew and lost to AIDS in his younger days. But the standouts are Adele Haenel’s Sophie and Antoine Reinartz’s Thibault as the de facto leaders of the Paris chapter. The passion these actors bring to their roles is inspiring to the point that you’re eager and ready to aid and abet any scheme their characters concoct. And the invigorating back and forth between them and the other members is something the Congress could learn a lesson or two from, most notably the outlawing of any clapping and cheering. If you agree with something, you simply snap your fingers, preventing any interruptions or distractions. Imagine how much shorter the State of the Union would be with this technique.

Campillo and his co-writer, Philippe Mangeot, give the ACT UP participants plenty of thoughtful things to say, too, in humanizing their righteous anger. The dialogue between the leaders in the front of the room and the soldiers in the seats is reminiscent of the dynamic in Campillo’s award-winning script for “The Class,” a fast-paced exchange of ideas and thought between a teacher and his students. “BPM” is very similar, straying from the meeting room only to show the protest plans put into action and for Campillo to introduce a sexually charged romantic element involving two of the activists: puckish Sean (a superb Nahuel Perez Biscayart), an HIV positive Argentine transplant, and the less demonstrative Nathan (Arnaud Valois), a “non-poz” newbie.

Their story is heartbreaking, particularly when Sean’s T-count begins a steady decline, but it feels shoehorned into the larger theme of AIDS activism. It reminded me a lot of “The Post,” another movie that tries too hard to squeeze two stories -- the publishing of the Pentagon Papers and Katharine Graham’s fight for equality in a “man’s game” - into one. The oscillating between the two facets is distracting and slows the momentum of a movie that already strains to sustain at an overlong 142 minutes.

Patience is rewarded, though, in the final 15 minutes when the death of a founding ACT UP member comes to the fore and the surviving activists stroll past the body, not just to pay respects, but to see their own bleak futures laid out right in front of them. Campillo is terrific at conveying these emotions through his richly drawn characters, allowing you to feel what they feel in a relentless fight to save themselves in a race against the clock. It raises the empathy level to 12. It’s sad, yes, but “BPM” is also very much alive, pulsating with optimism and strength on the part of people like Marco (Theophile Ray), a school boy, whose wonderfully supportive mother, Helene (Catherine Vinatier), often reminds us he was just 16 when infected with HIV.

When the protester’s attack the institutions they believe are fighting against them, Marco is always at the front, often acting impetuously, most memorably by mistakenly throwing a balloon full of fake blood at the head of the government’s AIDS coalition. Like the others, he’s exceptionally brave, intimidated only by the one thing that truly frightens him, death. It’s lurking everywhere like a hidden time bomb, threatening to explode in a war not just against authority, but also against a threat coming from inside a place they no longer can trust -- their own bodies.